Beauty: A Theological Engagement with Gregory of Nyssa

By Natalie Carnes

Beauty engages fourth-century bishop Gregory of Nyssa to address beauty's place in theology and the broader world. With the recent resurgence of attention to beauty among theologians, questions still remain about what exactly beauty is, how it is perceived, and whether we should celebrate its return. If beauty fell out of favor because it was seen to distract from the weightier concerns of poverty and suffering--because it can even be a tool of oppression--why should we laud it now? Gregory's writings offer surprisingly rich and relevant reflections that can move contemporary conversations beyond current impasses and critiques of beauty. Drawing Gregory into conversation with such disparate voices as novelist J. M. Coetzee and art theorist Kaja Silverman, Beauty displays the importance of beauty to theology and theology to beauty in a discussion that bridges ancient and modern, practical and theoretical, secular and religious.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Nov 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781630876678

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Beauty

a theological engagement with gregory of nyssa

Natalie Carnes

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BEAUTY

A Theological Engagement with Gregory of Nyssa

Copyright © 2014 Natalie Carnes. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-584-5

EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-667-8

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Carnes, Natalie Michelle.

Beauty : a theological engagement with Gregory of Nyssa / Natalie Carnes.

xvi + 272 p. ; 23 cm. —Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-584-5

1. Aesthetics—Religious aspects—Christianity.

2

. Gregory, of Nyssa, Saint, approximately

335

–approximately

394

.

3

. Philosophical theology. I. Title.

BT55 .C38 2014

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

For Matthew

Acknowledgments

It is a happy task to count my blessings by numbering my debts, though the list here cannot exhaust them. This book began as a dissertation under the advisement of Stanley Hauerwas and with close attention from Paul Griffiths, each of whom read the manuscript multiple times and gifted me with their difficult questions. Warren Smith and Liz Clark patiently helped me navigate late antiquity, and Jeremy Begbie pressed me on questions of theological aesthetics and pneumatology. It is a better book for their support, suggestions, and puzzlements.

In 2009–10, I participated in a dissertation working group at the Franklin Humanities Institute. I am grateful for the feedback I received there, particularly from Ignacio Adriasola, Erica Fretwell, and Brian Goldstone. At least twice Brian introduced me to resources that became central to my argument and approach. Jonathan Tran likewise introduced me to material that has proven formative both for this book and for my development as a scholar, and I imagine my debt to him will only continue to multiply over the years. Sean Larsen and Ben Dillon offered questions and insights that improved two of these chapters directly and the rest indirectly. Crucial during the initial drafting of these chapters was the emotional and childcare support of Sarah Decker and Jessie Eubank as well as conversations with Pete Jordan, Andréa Taylor, Sheryl Overmyer, Greg Lee, T. J. Lang, Nathan Eubank, and Carole Baker.

Baylor has given me valuable institutional support in the form of summer sabbaticals for 2012 and 2013, supportive and interesting colleagues, and Bill Bellinger, who is unanimously regarded by the Baylor Religion Department as the world’s greatest boss. I might also be lucky enough to have the world’s greatest graduate assistant, as I am much indebted to David Cramer for his possibly obsessive attention to editorial detail. My thanks also to Mike Whitenton, who spent a summer editing a manuscript far from his own field.

I thank the people at Cascade Books, particularly Charlie Collier, for support, flexibility, and speed in seeing this project through. In the shrinking world of academic publishing, Cascade continues to take risks, benefiting all of us who work in theology.

Writing a book, of course, requires support beyond academia and its institutions. I have been fortunate to have an extended family that has helped by offering encouragement, mustering interest, and caring for children. I thank my parents Mike and Suzi, my parents-in-law Pam and Will, and my sisters and siblings-in-law: Rosalind, Victoria, Mathew, Kevin, Kiraz, Elizabeth, Joseph, and Kate.

My daughter Chora arrived at the beginning of my writing and Edith in the midst of revisions. They have contributed very little to this book, but their presence fills my life with beauty.

My daughters are gifts I receive together with my husband, Matthew, whose love funds my life. From countless conversations, read-throughs, and edits, to his care for our children, to his prioritization of my work above his own—Matthew has made this book possible. There is no way properly to thank him, so I can only give to him what he has already given to me. Matthew, this book is for you.

Introduction

assembling truth’s shadow

Meditating on divine transcendence, Gregory of Nazianzus describes what it means to do theology by offering a picture of ho aristos theologos, the most excellent theologian. Such a theologian is not one who has discovered the whole of God’s being, he tells us, but one who has assembled more of truth’s shadow.¹ As elsewhere, Nazianzen here chastens would-be theologians, cautioning them about the treacheries of theologizing and directing them to epistemological modesty. Gregory of Nyssa also uses the imagery of light to name the fullness and poverty of theological knowing. Theology, for these friends, is done in the shadows. I take their image of the theologian as a shadow-dweller to display the character of my own work.

It is especially important to remember the shadowy character of theology in a project that purports to explore a name for God—for that is what I, like Gregory of Nyssa, take Beauty to be. In conversation with Gregory, I elaborate a vision of beauty in which it is characterized by fittingness and gratuity. I argue that we can articulate the beauty of an object by naming an aspect under which it is fitting, and in describing its fittingness with that aspect, we will find that it does not just fit; it fits exceedingly well. There is an excess to its fittingness that suggests the inability of the aspect to exhaust the object of beauty. This surplus of meaning that overflows the threshold of fittingness names the beautiful object’s gratuity. There is thus a gratuity to its fittingness. Together fittingness and gratuity suggest beauty’s dynamism.

The significance of understanding beauty with the categories of fittingness and gratuity is manifold, but one of the most important features of these terms is their elasticity. They are under-determined categories. They raise questions such as: Fitting with what? Gratuitous for whom? I take this elasticity as significant for illuminating both how beauty can go wildly wrong—how it can comply with cruelty and justify oppression—and also how it can be recovered as a form of resistance to cruelty and oppression. If we are going to reclaim beauty as the latter, we must be open-eyed about its history as the former. How can we avoid thinking of the devastation wreaked by the Nazi quest for the master race? Or the thousand ships launched by Paris’s desire to possess Helen? Or the swelling numbers and decreasing ages of women (and, increasingly, men) suffering with eating disorders? Or Toni Morrison’s Pecola, consumed and dis-integrated with the desire for blue eyes? Beauty has been implicated in misogyny, racism, war, and genocide. Even more: It is part of the entertainment that distracts us from these weighty concerns. Let’s not be sentimental about beauty. It has a past that calls for sackcloth and ashes.

Beauty is not alone in its devastating past. Truth, goodness, kindness, courage, justice, and peace also have terrible histories—histories that should not, however, surprise us. In a world where we crucified Love, how can we be surprised that we have also inflicted our sins on truth, goodness, and beauty? I remind us of our dark past, first, to underscore that we work in shadows and, second, to demonstrate the significance of fittingness and gratuity, which can help us describe claims to beauty both when we are perceptive and when we go wrong. For example: The context for the Nazi valuation of fittingness was the heterosexual, healthful Aryan body, and those bodies that did not fit under that rubric were eliminated. With the selections and exterminations entailed in realizing their image of a master race, the Nazis aspiring to perfect fittingness committed one of the most horrifying atrocities in a terror-ridden century, the gratuity of their ideal echoed in the gratuity of their violence. Fittingness and gratuity are thus one way to describe beauty’s implication in the Holocaust.

What this Nazi description should make plain to us is that a beauty characterized by fittingness and gratuity is at best morally neutral. That is, it is at least susceptible to implication in evil, if not given to it. If beauty is going to resist oppression, we need to give content to fittingness and gratuity. It is one thing to say that what a person perceives as beautiful can be described in terms of fittingness and gratuity. It is another to ask how our own perceptions of fittingness and gratuity can resist falling under the thrall of a master race or skinniness or whiteness. One way we might frame the possibility for a beauty that resists is to turn to Marxists, for example, to explain actions, social structures, and objects in terms and contexts that will illuminate just how unfitting, how unbeautiful they are. Education into a critical apparatus will (or can) change what we find beautiful. One result of discussing beauty in terms of fittingness and gratuity is that it leaves open the possibility for training into descriptions that will change our mind about a thing’s beauty, that will shed light on the object as unbeautiful or beautiful. The elasticity of fittingness and gratuity leaves room for catechesis into alternate descriptions of beauty, perhaps even a beauty that resists violence. Yet such resistance, in these cases, does not come from beauty itself. Beauty remains a capacious signifier that facilitates resistance energized by other sources.

Gregory of Nyssa claims more for beauty. He invokes a beauty that itself resists oppression, particularly the oppression of social structures that accommodate us to poverty, hunger, and suffering. Resistance comes both from the invisibility of Beauty and from its visibility on the face of the poor, as the image of God, and in eschatological glory. The way Gregory locates the beauty in which beautiful objects, actions, and people participate positions beauty to challenge assimilation to cruelty and sloth.

But this raises the question of how we access beauty as a form of resistance. How do we become a people who perceive the beauty Gregory describes, and not Nazis spellbound by the image of a master race? It turns out that training into perceiving Gregory’s beauty is a lifelong process that engages every sense of our body and spirit, that requires cultivating relationships of love with our neighbor, and that includes our membership in a community named the church.

What I have been tracing here are the lines of argument in my three constructive chapters, which move from fittingness and gratuity to poverty to subjectivity. There is another, more explicitly theological, layer of argument driving these explorations. In chapter 2, I explore the significance of beauty as fittingness and gratuity by reframing fittingness and gratuity with Gregory’s doctrine of God, particularly in the non-contrastive transcendence Gregory claims creatio ex nihilo entails. Because Beauty is a name for God, fittingness and gratuity disclose something of who God is, but what we know of God also requires a radicalization of fittingness and gratuity. That is, the internal relation of Beauty’s fittingness and gratuity is in one way like a ladder: the gratuity of beauty’s fittingness with one aspect impels ascent to another aspect. At different points, Gregory himself uses the ladder to describe both ascent to Beauty and ascent to God.

Still, the ladder image is not definitive of Beauty or God. Ultimately the relation between fittingness and gratuity cannot be like the relation of the rungs of a ladder to the sides, for, as Gregory claims, no created thing can claim to be fitting for God. As Gregory elaborates the significance of creatio ex nihilo, he suggests a relationship between fittingness and gratuity that is like the relationship between the radical transcendence and the utter immanence of God—the one elaborates the other.

In the third chapter, I turn from the doctrine of God to the more specific subject of Christology to consider beauty and poverty in light of the one who emptied himself of glory to take on the form of a bondservant. By framing the chapter with the concern that beauty is bourgeois, I address a critique that has kept beauty in academic exile for much of the twentieth century. Yet beauty’s home, I argue, is not the sanitized spaces of bourgeois living. While modernity’s articulation of beauty, like strands of its philosophy, has often deflected the difficulties of reality like horror and ugliness, Gregory’s beauty, like his theological language, is formed in the difficulties of reality. It is a beauty that, while not reducible to ugliness or horror, cannot be found apart from them.

The fourth chapter, in which I explore how one accesses the beauty Gregory describes, takes us to pneumatology to complete the Trinitarian exploration of beauty. To ask how we become the kind of people who can perceive beauty rightly is inevitably, for Gregory, to ask how the Holy Spirit makes us the kind of people who can see beauty rightly. Here I develop lines of thought from Gregory on the self as wounded by love and consider the significance of such woundedness for perceiving beauty. As I do, I make plain that as bourgeois social spaces are not beauty’s home, neither is bourgeois training the right way to draw near to beauty. This move is enabled by how Gregory locates the organ of beauty’s perception: not, like so many modern accounts, in the imagination, which suggests training as exposure to the right literature and art, but in the entire anthropology of the human. Such perception is perfected for Gregory in the spiritual senses, which extend the capacity of the physical senses to perceive beauty and which are trained through attentive love to the neighbor and the afflicted and through the liturgy of the church.

Readers familiar with Gregory will note how little I work out of his theological treatises and polemics. Against Eunomius, On the Making of the Human, On the Soul and the Resurrection, The Catechetical Oration, and On Not Three Gods all make little to no appearance in what follows, even though they are rich and important texts. This is partly because I focus on those texts I find most generative of conversation about beauty. But this is also because I am interested in Gregory’s texts that do not immediately present themselves to modern eyes as texts for theological study. These are the texts, by and large, in which systematic theologians have been slower to show interest. Gregory’s hagiography of his sister, his first rhetorical exercise, his scriptural commentaries, his homilies—these are the texts on which I primarily work, trying as I do to attend to the literary conditions of theological writing and the theological commitments of Gregory’s literariness. It seems fitting that the literary and the theological be joined in this way in a work that purports to explore beauty. For through these arguments, I hope to make clear not just the way theological descriptions give us a compelling vision of beauty, but also the way considerations of beauty should be central to generating theological descriptions.

If this last point sounds familiar, it is because rendering the significance of beauty to theologizing was also the project of Hans Urs von Balthasar and has influenced many theologians since. I am indebted to Balthasar in more ways than one. He not only thought about beauty, but exposited Gregory of Nyssa in his book Presence and Thought (Présence et pensée, 1942). In the preface to that book, Balthasar explains his retrieval of Gregory in terms that describe my own relationship to Gregory more than seventy years later. He writes:

There is never a historical situation that is absolutely similar to any of the ones that preceded it in time. Thus there is no historical situation that can furnish us with its own solutions as a kind of master key capable of resolving all the problems that plague us today.²

Historical difference, while a cautionary tale for historians, can be generative for theologians. I look to Gregory, not out of nostalgia for a time past, but for a partner in diagnosing and moving beyond the problems currently plaguing us. Such a constructive project, while not purposed toward historical reconstruction, is improved by historical accuracy. Attending to the historical conditions of Gregory can tell us more about who this partner is and give us richer ways to interpret his texts; learning more about what beauty has signified and the work it has done in modernity can help us understand the limits and possibilities for it in contemporary conversations. Before any constructive work, then, we will begin with some historicizing, which takes us to chapter 1.

1. καὶ οὗτος ἄριστος ἡμῖν θεολόγος, οὐχ ὃς εὗρε τὸ πᾶν, οὐδὲ γὰρ δέχεται τὸ πᾶν ὁ δεσμός, ἀλλ’ ὃς ἂν ἄλλου φαντασθῇ πλέον, καὶ πλεῖον ἐν ἑαυτῷ συναγάγῃ τὸ τῆς ἀληθείας ἴνδαλμα, ἢ ἀποσκίασμα, ἢ ὅ τι καὶ ὀνομάσομεν. Gregory of Nazianzus, De filio, 170.

2. Balthasar, Presence and Thought, 10. I cannot resist quoting the several beautiful sentences immediately preceding, in which Balthasar elaborates his point through an extended analogy between artistic making and theological writing: This return [of the theologian to the past] will be beneficial, but only on one condition: that he understand well that history, far from dispensing us from creative effort, imposes it on us. Our artists, and in particular our architects, all acknowledge this. A Greek temple, a Romanesque church, a Gothic cathedral all merit our admiration, because they are witnesses to a beauty and truth that are incarnate in time. But to reproduce them now in our present day would constitute an anachronism, all the more appalling to the extent the copies were more minutely exact. The intent to revive them, to adapt them to the needs of time, would be even worse. Such an effort could only beget horrors. All attempts at ‘adaptation’ to current tastes are doomed to the same fate. In neo-Greek style, the column of antiquity loses its original qualities of simplicity and becomes an intolerable imitation. And the same may be said of Saint Thomas: ‘A great and estimable doctor, renowned, authoritative, canonized, and very much dead and buried’ (Péguy). We should not imagine that there are other estimable figures who in our eyes are better capable of withstanding such treatment! We have turned our gaze on a more distant past, but we have not done so in the belief that, in order to give life to a languishing system of thought, it would suffice to exhume the ‘Greek Fathers’ and adapt them for better or worse to the needs of the modern soul. We are not ingenuous enough to prefer a ‘neopatristic’ theology to a ‘neoscholastic’ theology! (10).

1

On Gregory of Nyssa and Beauty

genealogical threads

Before a performance, the stage must be set. And to set the stage for this theological performance is to introduce its two main characters, first Gregory of Nyssa and then beauty, by telling a story about each character. Story one begins in the twilight of antiquity, as light grays around rhetorically gifted and beauty-loving bishop Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–394). The second story opens as the starry medieval night breaks into the dawn of modernity. The new day glares on beauty, whose grandeur fades in the bright Enlightenment.¹ It fades as beauty suffers transformations that by late modernity have feminized beauty, marginalized her, and left her vilified as market promiscuous. She is exiled from her once-central location in theological thought and scholarly work.

This chapter recounts the stories of these characters to stage a performance in which Gregory wanders through the set of modernity, asking after, seeking, and finding beauty, to rehabilitate her as and for theology. The rehabilitation, however, cannot just be beauty’s; the theological terms on which beauty’s exile were approved must themselves recover. For to reclaim the theological significance of beauty is to suggest both that a full and flourishing conception of beauty requires theological description and also that a full and flourishing theology does not marginalize beauty as a peripheral concern. So if one description of the performance might be tiresomely gendered—an active male character restoring a passive, feminized one—another account yields a fresher take: A feminized character redeems a rather male-dominated discipline. For, if beauty has become a woman for moderns, she names God for Gregory, and as a name for God, she rightly disciplines, guides, and proliferates theological work.

The present chapter prepares for this performance of double-restoration of beauty and theology by evoking the disparate worlds of the main characters. I begin with Gregory of Nyssa and reflect on his life by tracing themes especially significant for the constructive chapters: family and friendship, rhetoric, training, and death. I conclude the story of Gregory with a brief turn to the history of reception that yielded the narratives we tell and texts we have of Gregory today. From there I move on to beauty and attend to several voices accounting for how beauty came to be discussed (and not discussed) in the modern world. Of particular interest in these accounts are changes in its status and presence in North Atlantic academic conversation—changes that are not unrelated to the social and intellectual history of modernity. I end the chapter by noting recent theological performances on beauty—work I consider to be itself quite beautiful, and which gives me a loose model for how I will proceed. Gregory, then, need not pioneer beauty’s reclamation, but only join a growing chorus of theologians sounding the centrality of beauty to theology.²

Story One: Gregory of Annisa, Caesarea, and Nyssa

Gregory lived in one of the most contentious centuries in Christian history. The church was evolving from persecuted to persecutor, and the ones whom it persecuted were its own. Gregory’s story is woven into these power struggles of church and empire. He was himself one of the persecuted: Under the influence of the Eunomians,³ Emperor Valens permitted his exile. Yet he was also one of the powerful: His brother Basil was bishop of the important see of Caesarea, and he himself was also a bishop, though of a less important see, as was his good friend Gregory of Nazianzus. Together these three, known collectively as the Cappadocian Fathers, set about Trinitizing the church. So the story goes.⁴

It is easy to extract these three men and name their importance as the Cappadocian Fathers because they wrote treatises, debated doctrines, convened synods, and attended councils. The further one goes into Nyssen’s writings, though, the more one sees the loss such extraction entails. On the one hand, extracting them as the Cappadocian Fathers is a loss because it overly conflates the three men and glosses over differences, particularly in theological style and commitment. ⁵ On the other hand, titling them as the Cappadocian Fathers overemphasizes their agency and significance at the expense of others’, especially that of their family members. In this second respect, the title inflates the aloneness, the uniqueness, the unrepeatability of their achievements. Yet Gregory was certainly not alone. Born into a wealthy, locally important family in Pontus, Gregory might deserve the distinction of belonging to one of the most significant Christian families in history. His friend witnesses to the family’s significance for the church. Upon the death of Gregory’s mother, Emmelia, Gregory of Nazianzus wrote epigrams about her. In one, he marveled at the wealth of her mighty womb.⁶ In another, he exclaimed,

Emmelia is dead! Who would have thought it, she who gave to life the light of so many and such children, both sons and daughters married and unmarried? She alone among mortals had both good children and many children. Three of her sons were illustrious priests, and one daughter the companion of a priest, and the rest were like an army of saints.⁷

The rest brought Emmelia’s total to nine children.⁸ They included Macrina and Naucratius, who would influence the development of Christian monasticism. Naucratius suffered an early death, but Macrina (c. 327–80) was a formidable influence on her family up through old age. As the eldest child, Macrina helped her mother raise her siblings, which meant that she loved them tenderly and rebuked them sternly. In his book about her, the Life of Macrina (De Vita Macrinae), Gregory testifies to her use of both parental modes.

Macrina is the hidden heroine of our story. It is gallingly familiar that a woman should perform the role of silent heroine enabling the rehabilitation a male hero performs. But how can we draw her out of hiding? Gregory of Nazianzus, too, wonders over Macrina’s hiddenness. As he does with Emmelia, Nazianzen brings his poetry to bear on Macrina after her death. He writes, The dust holds the illustrious virgin Macrina, if you have heard something of her, the first born of the great Emmelia. But who kept herself from the eyes of all men, is now on the tongues of all and has a greater glory than any.⁹ The qualification if you have heard something of her belies the ending declaration of her surpassing glory and makes plain the impossibility that she is on the tongues of all. We must understand Gregory of Nazianzus as describing Macrina’s glory in the eschatological present, which means that there is a strong not yet to the way humanity may perceive the glory of the one who kept herself from the eyes of all men. Not until every tongue has confessed the Lordship of Christ will they also celebrate the glory of Macrina.

Until then, Macrina, who occupied no position of power, who bequeathed to us no texts, meets us modern readers through her brother’s texts. For Gregory of Nazianzus was not the only Cappadocian to take note of Macrina’s hidden glory. Apparently troubled by her lack of renown, Gregory of Nyssa explains in the beginning of the Life of Macrina that if Macrina’s life were to remain veiled in silence, it would be a loss.¹⁰ He conceives of his writing, then, as a kind of unveiling, and he takes pains to assure the reader that the Macrina she meets in his text is, indeed, Macrina the Younger of Annisa. All the stories in his text come from personal experience,¹¹ and he insists he delivers them in an unstudied and unstylized manner.¹²

One needn’t doubt Gregory’s truthfulness to know the difficulty of discerning the historical Macrina. It is difficult to discern Macrina’s presence, for access to Macrina is always mediated by Gregory’s compositions; she’s a character in and of his memories, agendas, and debates. Nevertheless, Macrina, even as Gregory’s character, exceeds Gregory’s writerly purposes. At times she glimmers forth, reminding us that Gregory’s rehabilitative quest is a form of fidelity to her—she who showed him the beautiful Bridegroom into whose arms she finally disappeared. But we are never sure which appearance and disappearance reveals Macrina, daughter of Emmelia and founder of the monastic life at Annisa. Many have tried to pin this Macrina down,¹³ yet the lady always vanishes.¹⁴ We pay homage to her absent presence in the life of her disciple Gregory and consider the ways in which he presents his memory of Macrina as issuing him both comfort and challenge.

If Gregory at times presents Macrina as his most significant teacher,¹⁵ he refers to his brother Basil (c. 330–78/79) as his most distinguished—his only distinguished teacher, in fact.¹⁶ Basil, after all, had studied abroad in Athens with much success. For Gregory, Basil was the guardian of his oratory, his teacher, his father. Gregory’s own father died when he was young (the early 340s), so Basil, as the eldest brother, became a kind of father to his siblings.¹⁷ To most of them, at least: Basil was not a father to Macrina. Even her biological father could barely father her, as she used her father’s own theology to convince him, against his plans, to let her remain unmarried. Then at his death, she transformed his conventional, patriarchally ordered household into a (more) egalitarian ascetic community. Macrina had a powerful and deeply rooted vision for Christian life—one more powerful than her father’s and rooted before Basil’s. If anything, Macrina was more of a parent to Basil than the other way around. Thus Gregory reports that when Basil returned from Athens, flush with success and excessively puffed up, Macrina rebuked him and showed him an alternative to rhetorical competition. She displayed for him an ascetic life. She was not the only ascetic influence in Basil’s life—between Athens and Annisa, Basil journeyed east to tour the ascetic communities—but she was a significant one.¹⁸ The examples of Macrina, Naucratius, and the ascetic communities of the East (among other influences) enlivened Basil’s commitment to monasticism, which he would live out in his construction of a poor hospice. Gregory followed his siblings’ example by affirming such monastic commitments in his first text, On Virginity (De virginitate), which defended and eulogized Basil’s monastic program. Gregory’s undertakings as a young man show him to be ever the pupil of these two didaskaloi.

That Gregory referred to Basil as a teacher of distinction was more than a mark of brotherly pride. Basil had a remarkable education. After mastering grammar with his father at their home in Pontus, he went to Caesarea and Constantinople before traveling to Athens, then the center of philosophical and rhetorical education. Gregory of Nazianzus, whom Basil had met in Caesarea, was also in Athens, as, for a time, was Julian the Apostate, who would one day become emperor.¹⁹ As emperor, he would issue an edict forbidding Christians from teaching pagan literature.²⁰ But in the 350s in Athens, Christians and pagans studied rhetoric and philosophy together. Two of Basil’s most important educational influences in Athens were, in fact, Christian: his fellow student Gregory of Nazianzus and his teacher Prohaeresius. Named Athens’s unrivalled ‘King of Rhetoric’²¹ Prohaeresius was deeply respected by Christians and pagans alike. Julian later tried to celebrate this rhetorical king with the appellate honorary Hellenist, but in fact Prohaeresius’s approach was more accurately Christian Alexandrian. He had an Origenistic approach to learning that claimed continuity between the Logos of God and the logos of human learning.²² When Julian tried to protect Prohaeresius’s teaching chair from his edict that Christians not teach pagan literature, Prohaersius voluntarily resigned, his resignation testifying to his refusal to split the logos.

Prohaeresius was not the primary Origenistic influence on Basil and Nazianzen. Two generations earlier, Gregory Thaumaturgus—the namesake for both Gregorys—had evangelized Pontus with Origenist Christianity. After their return from Athens, Nazianzen and Basil would live some years in ascetic retreat, compiling many excerpts from Origen for their Philocalia. Origen would also provide Nyssen with a subject for his studies, many years later, when he responded to Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs with his own commentary on the same. In addition to the Jewish mystical thinker Philo of Alexandria and the inaugurator of the tradition known as Neoplatonism, Plotinus, Origen was the most significant mediator of Plato to Nyssen.²³ The influence of these Platonists on Gregory is varied, but key aspects of their thought include Philo’s negative theology and apophatic impulses, Origen’s commitment to universal salvation as elaborated in his doctrine of apokatastasis, and Plotinus’s descriptions of glimpsing Beauty itself.

But Gregory did not always take his Plato mediated. In On the Soul and the Resurrection, for example, Gregory not only models his dialogue on Plato’s Phaedo, he also imports passages from the Phaedrus wholesale, barely modifies them, and plunks them into the middle of his text.

In addition to providing Gregory and his theological predecessors a framework for working out theological commitments, Plato also bequeathed to them skepticism about rhetoric. His criticisms of the fifth-century sophists became the locus classicus for philosophical critiques of rhetoric.²⁴ The sophists use rhetoric to render persuasive whatever side of an issue they choose, whether for sport or money. In this way, Plato claims, they operate only in the realm of opinion, which corresponds to the realm of becoming, appearance, and change.²⁵ They mystify for people the realm that philosophers seek to illuminate: the realm of knowledge, which corresponds to the realm of being, truth, and unity. It is a realm arrived at by dialectic. Yet many sophists were not so anti-philosophical as Plato suggests. They were instead a-philosophical. They were in the business of imparting rhetorical techniques and were content to let their students get their metaphysics elsewhere. The Cappadocians encountered both kinds of sophists. Basil and Nazianzen were educated in Athens during the last florescence of the rhetorical period known as the Second Sophistic (330–90).²⁶ In the centuries since Plato, the terms rhetoric and philosophy had acquired different meanings. For Plato, sophistry named the activity of orators who were paid to give speeches for political candidates. But as the free city-state declined, so did political oratory.²⁷ Sophistry moved into the classroom, where rhetoric was taught alongside philosophy, though different schools claimed one discipline as a subset of the other. Rhetoric and philosophy were elastic terms, with rhetoric able to contract to denote stylistic tricks or stretch to mean something like humanism or political virtue.²⁸ Similarly, philosophy could mean something as narrow as a particular set of doctrines belonging to a traditional philosophic school, or something as broad as what rhetorical humanism is supposed to name. It could also mean something altogether different, as when it identified a radical ascetic moralism and mysticism that defined itself against rhetoric.²⁹ It is this latter strain that characterized the philosophical life fourth-century Christians identified with Christianity, as will be evident in our reading of the Life of Macrina. This understanding of philosophy as ascetic discipline cultivated skepticism about the prodigality of rhetoric.

Yet rhetoric, too, was figured as a kind of discipline, intrinsic to becoming a certain type of person—namely, a man. Maud Gleason argues in her book Making Men that rhetoric was a way to achieve and perform masculinity. She points to Galen, who exhorts men to nurture masculinity by navigating toward some mean between overly frequent exercise and a sedentary life. Too much exercise rendered one ill-fit for military or political life—no better than a pig, according to Galen—yet too little made one womanly. For achieving the appropriate level of activity, many doctors recommended the vocal exercise of rhetoric.³⁰ It has a number of benefits: Rhetoric exercises the chest and vital organs, increases yet purifies the body’s vital heat, and restores the body from fatigue.³¹ Most importantly, it increases the body’s intake of breath or pneuma, which is taken in through the bronchial tubes and the pores.³² Women, children, and eunuchs, in fact, cannot excel at oratory because their pores are too small to take in enough pneuma. (We see now that over- and under-exercising are both ways of being excessively bodily: Neither the overactive nor the inactive take in as much pneuma [breath, but also spirit] as the properly active.) But it was not just that women couldn’t benefit from oratory: They shouldn’t practice oratory, for public discourse, with its power to produce masculinity, was also policed as the province of men.³³ Rhetoric was something men could do and, through it, become more manly.

Rhetoric, then, was multivalent, presenting both problems and possibilities for the Christians in the late Roman Empire. However they might have railed against rhetoric, educated Christians of late antiquity could not help employing it. Ecclesial careers were steeped in rhetoric, beginning with the classical education accompanied by Progymnasmata—the textbooks that taught students the rhetorical genres and how to employ them—and ending, for those ordained, in a vocation that required regular homilizing. Thus we get the well-documented irony that some of the greatest rhetoricians of the late ancient world decried the dangers of rhetoric in their rhetorically skillful speeches. Writing about the three Cappadocian Fathers, George A. Kennedy puzzles over this paradox in his book Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times:

Virtually every figure of speech and rhetorical device of composition can be illustrated from their sermons, treatises, and numerous letters; they were also influenced by rhetorical theories of argumentation and arrangements, and probably by theories of memory and delivery as well, though direct evidence is lacking. Yet all three are repeatedly critical of classical rhetoric as something of little importance for the Christian, and none of them made, or even seriously attempted, a synthesis of classical and Christian rhetorical theory to describe their own practice. They were more successful in uniting Greek philosophy with Christian theology.³⁴

The anxiety about rhetoric is present in Gregory of Nyssa’s writing as well as Basil’s and Nazianzen’s, though he seemed to come to it later than his colleagues. Initially, at least, he seemed driven by a great thirst for Greek rhetoric and philosophy alike.

Who knows how long Gregory would have stayed in Athens had he been able to go? As the oldest son, it was Basil who received the privilege of the best education—yet Basil was not seduced into a life of teaching and learning in Athens. Had he stayed in Athens, Basil might have become the next Prohaeresius. He certainly had no shortage of opportunities to teach. But he was drawn back to his homeland after a tour of ascetic communities, and so in 356, he left Gregory of Nazianzus mourning his departure. Back on his native soil, he went first to Caesarea, where he taught. Among his pupils was his own brother Gregory of Nyssa. Then he went home to Annisa in Pontus, where Macrina met him with her rebuke.

During Gregory’s stint as a student in Caesarea, Cappadocia, he received the training he would first put to use as a teacher of rhetoric. It was a career made possible by Julian’s death in 363, when the 361 edict against Christians teaching Greek literature was rescinded. The scholarly consensus is that around this time, Gregory married—a status he seems to allude to in On Virginity.³⁵ Given his graphic description of grief upon the death of infants in On Virginity and his extended treatment of infant mortality